JoAnn Hoppe teaches ESL at Bronx Community College in New
York City. She has a Master of Fine Arts degree and an ESL teaching Certificate
from the New School for Social Research in New York.

Comic strips from the Sunday newspaper
can be used in a wide variety of ways to lighten ESL classes and provide an
interesting change of pace. Recently, I used them as a source of dialogue
and writing.

We started with a class
discussion about sports--which ones are popular in the students' countries,
shared experiences about the game. I had taped an article from the New York
Times to the blackboard, and a number of students had looked at it before
class.

The newspaper story, which
was related to a comic strip I had clipped, commented that people love to
catch foul balls at baseball games. I read a short section of the article
that told how a father had caught a foul ball for his children. Several of
the students told about how they had seen people catch foul balls and how
exciting it was to see that happen.

The students were then
divided into groups of four. Each group received a copy of the same comic
strip "Blondie". It had been enlarged, cut into separate frames
(pictures) and each dialogue had been whitened out. Students were asked to
put the six pictures in order and then writ a dialogue or story. It was emphasized
that there was not a "correct" order: making an interesting conversation
or story was the point. The students had a lot of fun with this lesson. Some
wrote the dialogue directly on the whitened area, and others, who had more
to say, used separate sheets of paper.

On completion, each group
came to the front and read their dialogue. Actually, it became like a skit
with each person playing a different role. It was fun to see the various ways
one could arrange and interpret the text--and even the drawings--for an original
comic strip about a sport within their own country. Other variations include
having students write the original dialogue as a story with reported speech,
and having them describe what happens at some of the more popular sports events
in their countries.